We sometimes do that on purpose. Mr. Turkey goes into the countertop roaster with a box of golden raisins, a bag of whole cranberries, a rough-chopped onion and a bunch of poultry seasoning in the cavity, and then a bottle of white Zin and a can of chicken broth poured in. This cooks slowly for a handful of hours and the resulting turkey is fall-apart tender and beyond moist.
Two drawbacks are that the skin will be ugly and not particularly tasty as it’s been steamed rather than roasted, and that making gravy with the drippings is a bit challenging - you need to strain out the fruit or the gravy will be noxiously sweet.
I had a lot of good food over the holidays, but I can still find room to complain. My mom likes to make Brussels sprouts at this special time of the year. Some consider them to be a rare treat; I consider them to smell like someone took the underwear off a bag lady, boiled it in skunk spray, and sprinkled burnt hair over the results. Yeccch.
As regards attitude issues or not…I think there’s a big difference between not liking something and being disdainfully dismissive of it because it’s not up to your standards. One is having an opinion, the other is being, frankly, a snob. Call me a cornball, but I think snobbery has absolutely no place in a holiday celebration. It seems totally at odds with the ideas of family, the holidays, and celebrations. I think of people who look down their nose at Granny’s frozen, pre-basted, preservative filled turkey cooked for 5 hours the exact same way I think of people who won’t try some dish we’ve made because it looks weird–if you can’t muster a better attitude than that, stay the hell home, you’re bringing the rest of us down.
Our holidays are typically full of food that is not the way we would cook it or the way we prefer it. Everything is packaged and has been cooked thoroughly into submission–turkey, ham, veggies, rolls. Most stuff needs some serious salting and/or buttering (with low-fat spread, my grandmother hasn’t bought a stick of real butter in at least 50 years). The most adventurous seasoning is some prefab poultry seasoning in the dressing. But it’s still mostly pretty damn tasty.
We had two dinners. Christmas Eve we had shrimp cocktail followed by a delicious turkey dinner. On Christmas we had Lobster Newburg. Oh man, it was good.
We did the lousy dinner – Butterball turkey, frozen corn, prepackaged stuffing, mashed potatoes from the deli section. The only thing made from scratch was the gravy. We were feeding five kids ages 5 to 10 and two of them actually said (voluntarily, no prompting) “This is really good food!” They all cleaned their plates. Dessert was Jello pudding cups and they were a big hit.
Last year we did prime rib and duck, everything from scratch, and they barely touched their food and there were no compliments from them.
This year we saved money and prep time and enjoyed their visit without having to worry over the meal. IMHO gourmet cooking is wasted on kids.
